Anime Expo 2009 Day 1

After watching the guys in Press area have an emotional meltdown before I got my press pass, I was kind of tired.

I did get to see my favorite Harlock character, Maetel.

I went to an industry panel of Hollywood guys discussing licensing manga properties. There were six guys on the panel. One of them was simply awed, awed!, by all the stories he found in the East he’d never known existed. China was building cites 5K years ago and God knows how many stories came out of their pre-history, so, yeah, guy, there might be a few stories you’ve never heard of. The other odd comment was that unlike Western comics characters, manga characters were not black/white good/bad guys. I might have mentioned Jonah Hex, the Ringo Kid, Quantrill Raiders, and General Robert E. Lee as examples of a complex Western “heroes,” but I didn’t feel like wasting my time. Some of the discussion was how to condense a long, complex, multi-layered manga into a Hollywood feature Amurricans can understand and pay money to see. I think the answer is you fuck it up, dumb it down, and rip the soul out of it. Hollywood has perfected that over the years; expect to see many of your manga favorites eviscerated at a cineplex near you. Not everything translates to the silver screen, but generations will have to die out before this is realized. Oh well.

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